I gave a lecture at the University at ten in the morning that Friday, followed by coffee with some of the faculty, and didn’t get back to my hotel till 11.45. I had been advised by Simon Greensmith to hire a taxi to take me to Auschwitz and bring me back because the public transport is slow and inconvenient, and I had ordered it at the hotel reception desk for 12.15, giving myself time to have a sandwich in the bar. I had acquired a false idea of how near Auschwitz was to Cracow - that was my second mistake. When I asked the young woman at Reception how far it was I thought she said ‘thirty minutes’, but as the journey dragged on and on I decided I must have misheard - perhaps she had said ‘thirty kilometres’. After a few miles of motorway towards the airport, the road to Oswieçem (the Polish name of the town of Auschwitz) became a congested single carriageway. There had been a fall of snow in the night, and the fields and trees were virgin white, but the road was slushy, impeding progress. My taxi was an old black Fiat with a noisy diesel engine and worn-out shock-absorbers. The thick-set, leather-jacketed driver spoke little English and seemed disinclined to improve it by practice. ‘How much longer?’ I kept asking, and he would shrug and grunt and lift his hands from the wheel in a gesture signifying, ‘It depends on the traffic.’ Near Oswieçem we were held up for several minutes at a level crossing, while an enormously long train of closed goods vans rumbled slowly past, a grimly appropriate prelude to my visit, but another frustrating delay. In the end the journey took well over an hour, and I found I had just one hour and forty minutes to assimilate the reality of the most appalling mass murder in recorded history.
At the entrance to the site there is a Visitors’ Centre with photographic displays, a cafeteria, and a cinema showing film footage of the camp when it was occupied which I couldn’t spare the time to see. Admission is free unless you want to hire a personal guide, which I declined. I was going to have to proceed at my own pace, which would be almost indecently brisk. The famous, or infamous, gate to the camp proper, with the slogan
Arbeit Macht Frei
inscribed above it in wrought iron, is surprisingly small, and the camp itself is physically something of an anticlimax after the dread with which one approaches it, out of scale with the enormity of the crimes committed there. It resembles a grim London housing estate built between the wars, or a military barracks - which it was originally. Uniform three-storey brick blocks are laid out in a grid pattern, with trees planted along the paths or roads between them. I hadn’t expected trees. There were not many visitors moving around the site, because of the time of year I presume, and I followed the imprints of their footsteps on the thin layer of snow that covered the paths and roadways instead of puzzling over the map in my guidebook.
A number of the blocks have been turned into museums dedicated to particular aspects of camp life - bleak dormitories, beds with straw mattresses, minimal washing facilities, the coarse striped prison clothing - or particular ethnic and national groups who suffered there. The walls are lined with portraits of prisoners, photographed with typical German efficiency full-face and in profile. The faces are haunting: some look impassive, some angry, some mad. A few even smile faintly, perhaps hoping this would ingratiate them with their captors. Block 11 was the punishment block. Here are the cramped ‘standing cells’ in which it was impossible to lie down, and rooms with benches for floggings and hooks for hauling prisoners off their feet by their arms tied behind their backs. Here men and women condemned to death were forced to strip naked and marched outside to be shot against a wall, the windows of the adjoining block being boarded up so that no one could witness the executions. Just outside the boundary wall of the camp is the crematorium where their corpses were burned, and which also housed a gas chamber. Somebody had left a wreath of flowers beside the ovens. And there was the block called ‘Extermination’, with the heartbreaking heaps of women’s hair, children’s clothing, and shoes, displayed behind glass.
I knew from my guidebook that Auschwitz comprised two camps - the one I was in, designed as a concentration camp, which worked its prisoners to death and treated them with great brutality, but was not dedicated to killing them, and a bigger camp called Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the policy of extermination was carried out. I had supposed they adjoined each other, but discovered from my driver that Birkenau was two or three kilometres distant. He said that he would wait in the car park outside the Visitors’ Centre to drive me there. As the light of the winter afternoon waned I hurried my pace around the main camp, fearing I would be too late to get into Birkenau. I felt stupid and incompetent, having steeled myself to make this reluctant visit and then given myself insufficient time to absorb it, and I cursed my defective hearing which I was sure had caused the miscalculation. It was a quarter to three by the time we left the main camp, and I could only hope that I might be allowed five minutes in Birkenau, or if not, be able to view it from outside the perimeter fence before darkness fell. Five minutes for Birkenau: the phrase seemed to encapsulate my folly.
By the time we got there it was already three by my watch. The place was almost deserted, with just a few vehicles in the featureless car park. There was no Visitors’ Centre, there were no turnstiles, no visible staff, and few lights in the windows of the redbrick building which forms the entrance, its outline familiar from films and photographs, and its design so banal that it might have been modelled with a child’s building blocks: a square gatehouse, with a pitched tiled roof and one-storey wings to each side, which squats over an archway through which the railway line passes into the camp and seems to continue straight on to the horizon, to infinity, which is where nearly everybody who arrived there by train was going, very soon. There was an iron grille across the archway. ‘It’s closed,’ I said dejectedly to my driver. ‘No, you can go in. I wait,’ he said, and pointed to an entrance on one side of the building.
It seems that although Birkenau officially closes at the same time as the main camp, visitors are allowed to stay on and roam about the site unsupervised. I joined the few who were still there that cold afternoon. What first strikes you when you enter the place is its sheer immensity, stretching out of sight to the right of the railway line, rows and rows of huts marked only by their foundations and the brick chimneys that rise from the centre of each oblong like elongated tombstones. Most of the huts were destroyed by the Germans before they left, or plundered by Poles for timber after the war, or have been worn away by wind and weather over the years, but a few have been preserved to give one an idea of what it was like to occupy them. Flimsy structures with gaps in their clapboard walls, mud floors, rough wooden bunks and just one small stove, they must have been stifling in the heat of summer and bitterly cold in winter.These were the living quarters of prisoners deemed strong enough to work, but they were not habitations designed to keep human beings alive for very long.
A path stretches alongside the railway line and the platform where the trains discharged their human cargo, and information boards explain in several languages what happened next: the separation of men from women and children, and then the separation by SS doctors of those who would be allowed to live for a while from those who would be marched immediately to the gas chambers at the far end of the camp, believing, or wanting to believe, what they were told, that they were going to have showers, which, after days in a crowded cattle car with one bucket for a latrine, must have been a welcome prospect. Within hours of their arrival they would have been gassed and cremated, thousands in a single day, well over a million in all.
It has been said often enough that there are no words adequate to describe the horror of what happened at Auschwitz, and in other extermination camps whose traces were more thoroughly obliterated by the retreating Nazis. There are no adequate thoughts either, no adequate emotional responses, available to the visitor whose life has contained nothing even remotely comparable. One feels pity of course, and sorrow, and anger, but these feelings seem as superfluous to the immensity of woe this place evokes as tears dropped into an ocean. Perhaps tears would in fact be some relief, but like Richard I do not weep readily. In the end perhaps the best you can do is to humble yourself in the face of what happened here, and be for ever grateful that you weren’t around to be drawn into its vortex of evil, in either suffering or complicity. By chance - through my own incompetence - I experienced this place of desolation in a way I knew I would never forget.
At first I saw other visitors, mostly in small groups or couples, walking beside the railway line, or moving between the wooden huts that have been preserved, and several passed me making their way to the exit. But as I moved deeper and deeper into the camp, as the natural light faded, darkness fell, and the temperature dropped to zero, there were fewer and fewer of them visible, the sounds of their voices ceased, and eventually it seemed to me that I was all alone. Normally in such a situation I would have removed my hearing aid to give my ears some relief; but I kept the earpieces in, because I wanted to hear the silence, a silence broken only by the crunch of my shoes on the frozen snow, the occasional sound of a dog barking in the distance, and the mournful whistle of a train. Arc-lights mounted at intervals on tall poles lit the path and shed some light across the railway and over the snow-covered foundations of the nearer huts. The black silhouettes of their bare chimneys stood out against the white expanse in receding rows until all visible features became lost in darkness. It was impossible to see the perimeter of the camp - it seemed to go on for ever. Eventually, at the end of the railway line, I came to the memorial to the victims of Auschwitz, and on each side of it the purpose-built gas chambers and crematoria, which the Germans dynamited before they retreated from the advancing Russian army. These structures have been left untouched, mounds of brickwork and jagged slabs of ferro-concrete. In a niche in the ruins of one of them somebody had placed a small votive candle or lamp, of the kind you see in churches, and perhaps synagogues, in a red glass vessel. Its feeble flickering flame was the only light in this part of the camp, and the only sign of life in the landscape of death. I hoped it would last through the night. I stood for some minutes watching the flame, until the cold began to chill my bones; then I retraced my steps. My taxi was all alone in the car park, its engine running to keep the heater going. I was the last person out of Auschwitz that day.
I apologised to the driver for keeping him waiting. He gave a grunt and shoved the gear lever into first, making the back wheels sashay in the snow as he accelerated away. I was grateful for his taciturnity on the way back to Cracow. I wanted to go over in my mind all I had seen that afternoon, ensuring that it was safely stored in my memory. I was engaged to have dinner with the British Council’s Language Officer in the evening, but I decided to call him and cancel it. It was to have been nothing formal, just the two of us, a dutiful offer to keep me company on my last evening, but I didn’t really want to talk to him about Auschwitz, and I didn’t want to talk about anything else. Suddenly I was impatient to get home and tell Fred about it. I had called her only twice, from Warsaw and Lodz, and we didn’t talk for long. If I use hotel phones with my hearing aid in place I get a feedback howl in my ear, and it’s a struggle for me to hear what she’s saying without it. She told me that Anne had been sent home by the maternity hospital and advised to take things very easy - no reason for alarm there. She had phoned Dad, and he seemed disorganised but OK. He asked her who Richard was. ‘
Bloke called Richard says he’s coming to see me - what d’you think he wants?
’ She told him. I was glad that Richard had responded to my hint.
I nodded off in the back seat on the return journey: the car was warm, and I was very tired. I woke as we stopped abruptly at an intersection near the city centre. It was Friday evening, the pavements were crowded, and lights blazed from shop windows stacked with food, laptop computers and designer sportswear.Auschwitz seemed as far away as the moon. When we got to my hotel I paid off the driver and gave him a generous tip, which provoked his first smile of the day. The girl at the reception desk smiled too. ‘A message for you, Professor,’ she said, plucking a folded piece of paper from the pigeonholes behind her. ‘I take the call myself. Congratulations!’
I unfolded the message form.
‘Mrs Bates phoned at 3.15 p.m. Your doghter birthed a baby boy today. Mother and baby both fine.’
I went to my room and called Fred, who gave me all the details she had received from Jim: the baby was born that morning, four weeks premature, smallish (five pounds seven ounces) but perfect, the labour lasted about six hours, Anne tired but blissfully happy, Jim present throughout and over the moon, in short all good news. ‘And how are you, darling?’ Fred asked, when we had exhausted this topic. ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I went to Auschwitz today.’ ‘Did you?’ She sounded surprised: I hadn’t told of her of my plan in case I changed my mind. ‘Was it awful?’ ‘It was unforgettable, ’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I get home.’ ‘Yes, do, darling, not now,’ she said. ‘Let’s not spoil the birth of your first grandchild with such a gloomy topic. They’re going to call him Desmond, by the way.’ ‘Poor kid,’ I said, though in truth I was pleased.
I called the British Council chap and cancelled the meal. He knew where I had been that afternoon and was understanding. ‘A lot of people feel they’d rather be on their own for a while after they’ve been there,’ he said. I told him about the birth of Anne’s child. ‘Well, that’s great!’ he said. ‘That should cheer you up.’ And of course it did, but I didn’t know quite how to balance this private joy against the experience of Auschwitz, one new life against a million deaths. It didn’t feel quite right to celebrate all on my own with champagne from the minibar. Instead I ordered a room-service dinner with a half-bottle of Bulgarian red, and while I was waiting for it made some notes about the afternoon which I have drawn on in writing this.